47Soul, the lords of the Shamstep

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Among the largest electronics bands in the Arab world, 47Soul celebrate the history of their homeland, Palestine, through the union of Dabke and dubstep; the result is amazing

47Soul

The 47Soul were born in 2013 in Amman, Jordan, from the union of: El Far3i, Z the People, El Jehaz and Walaa Sbeit; 4 artists children of the Palestinian Diaspora united to relaunch the issues that have always gripped their people but with completely new and overwhelming musicality. The name of the band can be translated as “soul of” 47 “and refers precisely to what Palestine was before the birth of Israel, dating back to 1948.

In 2015 they launched the first album “Shamstep” which, will open an almost completely unexplored musical universe, allowing an ever wider audience to get to know “Shamstep”, a genre that de facto saw before as the only representative the great Omar Souleyman.

In 2018 “Balfron Promise” is released, an album that will confirm them at very high levels, allowing the band to start the first major international tours, as well as reaffirming their positions. “Balfron Promise” is in fact a play on words between the place where they physically recorded the album, the “Tower of Balfron” in London and the “Balfour Declaration”. The latter can be considered the first promise made by the then British Secretary of Foreign Affairs to Baron Walter Rothschild, one of the most important Zionist leaders ever. In 2020, El Jehaz left the band because of too much stress from the constant gigs, however the band announced their third album, Semitics, for August 21 of the same year.

Te lords of the Shamstep

One of the great merits of the 47Soul is certainly to be found in having identified a genre that “began to breathe but lacked substance”. In 2013 artists such as Omar Souleyman were still seen as something, overall, experimental, not suitable for sending messages that could be complex or exaggeratedly refined. Unlike the great Syrian, however, the members of 47Soul have grown a lot within a now hybrid musical panorama between West and East, allowing them to take the best of both worlds.

Their sound, in fact, combines elements absolutely typical of hip-hop and reggae with sounds typical of Bilad ash-Sham (Shamstep stands for “dubstep” of “Sham“) such as those related to dabke. The result is really something crazy, a hypnotic melody that enchants in every song and an atmosphere that is linked both to the London suburbs and to that of Jerusalem. Thanks for existing, your music is a kind of drug.

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